I'm working on a website that will eventually have its navigation on a ferris wheel. Each car on the wheel will have a different nav option on it. So I wanted to let the user spin the ferris wheel to scroll through the menu.

Instead of having the cars static, or keyframed to animate a certain way, I figured it wouldn't be too hard to write a quick and dirty physics simulation to make the cars swing as the wheel accelerates.

(Note: The mechanism for spinning the wheel was created in a very slapdash manner. The movie just looks at the position of the mouse cursor. The final site will have something much more elegant and intuitute. The purpose of this demo was just to get the pendulums to swing in a somewhat believable fashion.)